Music in Tomorrow’s Urban Environments

Written by Leroy Roncken

People dream of cities of tomorrow where problems of today are solved. These imagined utopias seem to get a step closer to reality in the recurring world expos, where people, visions, and technologies meet. The world expo of 2025 was recently announced to take place in Osaka Kansai, and the plans and promotions are well underway (Bureau International des Expositions n.d.; Expo 2025 n.d.). This particular expo provides an apt case for exploring how people strive to realise these ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’—or technologically supported collective dreams of attractive futures (Jasanoff 2015). In addition to this, I study how music functions as a promotional tool and as a means for reinforcing the expo’s ideologies, and propose ways for how these roles of music can be extended to the actual expo itself.

The forthcoming expo in Osaka Kansai is about realising the full potential of humans to attain an inclusive and sustainable future. The expo uses the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals as a point of reference for this, and wants to reach these goals through Japan’s sociotechnical imaginary called ‘Society 5.0.’ This strategy pivots on the role of humans in society, aided by ‘technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, big data, and biotechnology’ (Expo 2025 n.d.). Science and technology are employed to make human imagination happen—both on the scale of individual identities and collective formations. One of the expo’s main themes is the inclusion of everyone to ‘co-create our future society’ (Expo 2025 n.d.). In other words, the gap between the social and the technical is bridged.

Values of positivity and proactivity are reflected in the sound designs of the expo’s promotion videos. To take the ‘Flythrough Video of the Envisioned Venue’ as an example (Expo 2025 n.d.), music and sound effects combine to bring ideologies to the foreground. The music is in a happy sounding major key and in an upbeat tempo to encourage action. Instruments such as electric guitars and drums reinforce the aspect of human performativity and combine with synthesisers and videogame-like synthesised sound effects, which underpin the artificial, digital technologies. The sound design therefore draws attention to the harmony, so to speak, between the human and the technical. An expo like this would benefit from playing similar music at the venue to stimulate positive and proactive attitudes amongst the visitors, which would ideally entice the visitors to take more action towards achieving the desired future society. The music would also serve to elevate visitors’ experiences at the expo to one truly unforgettable.

Furthermore, the Osaka Kansai expo of 2025 draws strong connections between past, present, and future. On the one hand, the expo highlights the region’s ‘rich culture that blends the traditional with the modern’ and its enduring traditions of innovations with wide scale benefits (Bureau International des Expositions n.d.). On the other hand, it brings attention to the risks and fears of contemporary technological developments, such as rising inequality as a result of economic growth and fears for AI. The expo aims to dispel these risks and fears through providing a platform for participation and making ideas for a better future a practical reality.

The music provided in the promotion videos, in particular “Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan PR Video” created by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Expo 2025 n.d.), combines traditional music with futuristic music. Similar to the ‘Flythrough’ video, instrumentation plays a fundamental role in this: A violin and a piano are employed to represent more traditional music, which is followed by synthesisers to represent the futuristic. The end of the video contains diverse choirs that are accompanied by synthesisers, which suggests the continuing importance of human society within more futuristic settings. In this way, the music also helps to calm potential anxieties surrounding the increasing ubiquity of AI. Moreover, various sections of the video feature different harmonic material to represent different cultures, and thereby promote inclusivity. Major keys are profuse, for example, which are common in Western music traditions and have joyful connotations, and pentatonic accents are included to represent traditional elements of Asian music traditions. By playing music like this at the venue, ideologies like the fusion of traditional and future cultures, multiculturality, and inclusivity will be transferred to the expo’s visitors.

With its illustrations of dreams of future societies free from today’s troubles, the preparations for the Osaka Kansai expo of 2025 clearly demonstrate how humans and technologies can work together towards realising modern day sociotechnical imaginaries. Moreover, the expo shows the potential role of music within sociotechnical imaginaries in its promotional videos, which can be expanded towards the physical spaces of the expo and hopefully beyond—to the cities of the future.

References

Bureau International des Expositions. n.d. “Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai.” Accessed February 16, 2020. https://www.bie-paris.org/site/en/2025-osaka.

Expo 2025. n.d. “About the Expo.” Accessed February 16, 2020. https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2015. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 1-33. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This article is part of the graduate seminar series Urban Ecologies 2020.